Many of us find ourselves wanting to change other people in our lives. It might be a partner, a family member, a friend, or even a coworker.We have judgement around what is going on with them and believe that they should behave in accordance with our thoughts of what’s good for them.We believe this person has a problem and we want to solve what we see as the issue.But the truth is, we cannot change another person, and attempting to do so actually harms the relationship. This is another important part of minding our own business and allowing others to mind theirs.

Mind Your Own Business: Why You Can’t Change Other People

As a substitute for working on ourselvesWhen we’re trying to change other people, it’s often because we have our own healing to do. We might think it’s easier to change another person than to change ourselves. Trying to help another person is not a substitute for doing our own work. Our reactivity to that person’s behavior is likely our own unconscious issues coming up. It may feel easier to project onto another person and distract ourselves than face our own problems.

Why We Want To Change Other People

We may also want to feel like a hero for helping someone else to boost our own self-image.We might be attracted to someone because we believe that person is wounded and we can help them. We might believe we can love someone out of their issues and that this will heal us or help us feel better about ourselves. We also believe that that person will love us for saving them.This can also happen the other way around, where you have a wound and someone comes into your life to rescue you. Unfortunately, we can’t heal others, others can’t heal us.

To feel like a helper

Sometimes, people expect others to be able to heal them when they don’t want to take responsibility for healing themselves.Another person’s dysfunction is not about love or a lack of love. It’s about their woundedness; perhaps past traumas, addictions, or other factors.You can’t love someone out of their problems, and trying to do so is a recipe for disappointment. It’s inflating your own self-importance in a setup for more problems. We can think we’re being selfless, but we often have a hidden agenda. We want to be the one they’re leaning on and have an excuse not to do our own work.

Because others expect us to

Ultimately, one has to heal oneself. No one can do this work for another person.Let’s take a broken leg: A doctor can set the bone, prescribe medication, and guide the healing process. Other people can support that person while they heal by taking care of driving, shopping, and other tasks, but ultimately, the person is responsible for doing things that will help their leg heal like keeping their weight off of it, physical therapy, and following medical advice.It is the same with mental or emotional wounds. A person has to heal themselves, and they have to choose to heal. And this is not easy.

Why You Can’t Change Other People

Ultimately it is up to the other person to decide if they believe there is a problem, and if they want to do anything about it. If they do want to change, we can support them in their decision, but they must do the actual work.You can’t change other people, so do yourself a favor and stop expecting yourself to be able to. It’s hard enough for us to change ourselves. No one else can change us, and we can’t change anyone else.

Unreasonable Expectations

While we can’t heal someone, we can support them as they heal. Support verses EnablingSupport means that you care about the person and can offer love while they’re in the process of changing. For example, if you want to support a spouse in their recovery from alcoholism, support may include offering to watch the kids while they go to therapy or AA meetings (that they have chosen to attend) and listening to them on their healing journey.On the other hand, enabling means that you take responsibility, make excuses, or cover up for their behavior.

The Difference Between Supporting and Enabling

As always, the first step is noticing. Notice if you are trying to change or control someone. Are you more invested in their healing than they are in healing themselves? Are you using manipulation, anger, or other forms of control?Are you relying on someone else to heal you? Are you looking for a knight in shining armor to rescue you from your problems?The first step is always awareness and consciousness. Once you’re aware and conscious, you can ask yourself why this is a problem in your life? Until then, it’s hard to focus on changing your own behavior to promote your own growth.

Are you minding your own business or trying to force your agenda on someone else?

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”-Leo Tolstoy “If you do not change direction, you might end up where you are heading.”-Lao Tzu “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”-Rumi

Quotes on Change

We cannot change other people, and attempting to do so actually does far more harm than good in the relationship and for our own selves.

Mind Your Own Business: Why You Can’t Change Other People - The Art of Living Consciously

Humans form many bonds throughout their lives, beginning with the bonds formed with their caregivers in infancy. These early bonds help to shape an individual’s later sense of social attachment into adulthood. They also affect individuals neurologically and influence how people react to and cope with stressful social and <a href="https://thehumancondition.com/humanness-and-emotions/emotions/">emotional</a> situations.

Attachment Theory: Overview and Implications

Attachment theory is a psychosocial explanation for human bonding. Attachment styles inform many social relationships, including romantic attachments, family relations, friendships, long-term partnerships, and even interactions with strangers.

Attachment Theory: Overview and Implications - The Human Condition

Grief is undoubtedly stressful. It typically involves a long time of sadness or sorrow, but often other 'negative' feelings such as anxiety, guilt or anger.  The idea that our lives would be better without grief seems misguided.  People assume it's good to try to prevent others from suffering. But in the case of grief, most of us would be hesitant about trying to wipe out the grief of a bereaved friend. Not experiencing grief at all thus seems worse than experiencing grief.

Grief should not be avoided, despite feeling bad

Those with whom we have close relationships are not interchangeable commodities that can be replaced. So we grieve ultimately for how others’ deaths are losses to us. We do not grieve the deaths of everyone but only those with whom we have a relationship that is central to our understanding of ourselves and of what is most important to our lives. These deaths can also evoke a kind of identity crisis ('I've lost a part of myself').

Grief can cause a kind of identity crisis

Our emotions can inform us about what we value. In the case of grief, what we feel notifies us about what we value in our relationship with the person who is now deceased.  Grief allows us to appreciate how that person contributed to our day-to-day lives, shaped our goals and commitments, and showed traits we might emulate or avoid. The hurt we feel causes us to notice and reflect on these things.  Grief drained of all painful emotions would not be very valuable, as it would deprive us of critical information about what we have lost. The pain of grief is essential to understanding loss.

Grief signals loss

Because grief is distressing, it motivates us to learn how to live in light of the loss.  Our relationships cannot continue the same way as before. Grief offers us an abundance of information about how to change the relationship. For example, widows and widowers often must decide whether to continue to live in the same willing they had shared with their spouse, which belongings to retain or give away, and which charities should receive the deceased's assets.

Grief helps address the loss

Not every manifestation of grief is helpful. Sometimes the pain of grief is unbearable.  Grief is stressful, but not a shameful state that we should hope will resolve as quickly as possible. It is a potentially powerful tool for adapting to the loss.

Grieving is a tool

Grief feels bad, but that doesn’t mean we’d be better without it. By highlighting what we value, it can help us adapt to loss

Stashed ideas

There is consolation in a philosophical approach to grief | Psyche Ideas

What is love?Scientists in fields ranging from anthropology to neuroscience have been asking this question for decades.The scientific basis of love is often sensationalized, and as with most science, we don’t know enough to draw firm conclusions about every piece of the puzzle.What we do know, however, is that much of love can be explained by chemistry.

The Science Behind Love

Think of the last time you ran into someone you find attractive. You may have stammered, you may have said something incredibly silly or foolish and tripped spectacularly. And chances are, your heart was thudding in your chest.It’s no surprise that, for centuries, people thought love (and most other emotions, for that matter) arose from the heart. As it turns out, love is all about the brain – which, in turn, makes the rest of your body go haywire.

Total Eclipse Of The Brain

According to a team of scientists led by Dr. Helen Fisher, romantic love can be broken down into three categories:<ul><li>lust - driven by testosterone and estrogen</li><li>attraction - created by dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin</li><li>attachment - mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin</li></ul>Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones stemming from the brain.

Breaking Down Love

Lust is driven by the desire for sexual gratification. The evolutionary basis for this stems from our need to reproduce.The hypothalamus of the brain plays a big role in stimulating the production of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. While these chemicals are often stereotyped as being male and female, respectively, both play a role in men and women.Testosterone increases libido in everyone. The effects are less pronounced with estrogen, but some women report being more sexually motivated around the time they ovulate, when estrogen levels are highest.

Let's Get Chemical 

The testes and ovaries secrete the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen, driving sexual desire.Dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin are all made in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that controls many vital functions as well as emotion.Lust and attraction shut off the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which includes rational behavior.

Chemical Breakdown

While we can certainly lust for someone we are attracted to, one can happen without the other. Attraction involves the brain pathways that control reward behavior which explains why the first few weeks or months of a relationship can be so exhilarating and even all-consuming.Dopamine, produced by the hypothalamus, is a particularly well-publicized player in the brain’s reward pathway – it’s released when we do things that feel good to us. In this case, these things include spending time with loved ones and having sex. High levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, are released during attraction.

Love Is Its Own Reward

These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia. In fact, norepinephrine, also known as noradrenalin, which play a large role in the fight or flight response, kicks into high gear when we’re stressed and keeps us alert. Brain scans of people in love have actually shown that the primary reward centers of the brain, fire like crazy when people are shown a photo of someone they are intensely attracted to, compared to when they are shown someone they feel neutral towards.

Last but not least, attachment is the predominant factor in long-term relationships. While lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic entanglements, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies as well. The two primary hormones here appear to be oxytocin and vasopressin.

The Friend Zone

Oxytocin is often nicknamed “cuddle hormone” for this reason. Like dopamine, oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus and released in large quantities during sex, breastfeeding, and childbirth.The common factor here is that all of these events are precursors to bonding. It also makes it pretty clear why having separate areas for attachment, lust, and attraction is important: we are attached to our immediate family, but those other emotions have no business there.

This all paints quite the rosy picture of love: hormones are released, making us feel good, rewarded, and close to our romantic partners. Love is often accompanied by jealousy, erratic behavior, and irrationality, along with a host of other less-than-positive emotions and moods. It seems that our friendly cohort of hormones is also responsible for the downsides of love.Dopamine is the hormone responsible for the vast majority of the brain’s reward pathway – and that means controlling both the good and the bad. We experience surges of dopamine for our virtues and our vices.

Love Hurts

The dopamine pathway is particularly well studied when it comes to addiction. The same regions that light up when we’re feeling attraction light up when drug addicts take cocaine and when we binge eat sweets.Cocaine maintains dopamine signaling for much longer than usual, leading to a temporary high. Attraction is much like an addiction to another human being.The same brain regions light up when addicted to material goods as when emotionally dependent on our partners. Addicts going into withdrawal are not unlike love-struck people craving the company of someone they can't see.

Attraction Addiction

Dopamine, which runs the reward pathways in our brain, is great in moderate doses, helping us enjoy food, exciting events, and relationships.However, we can push the dopamine pathway too far when we become addicted to food or drugs.Similarly, too much dopamine in a relationship can underlie unhealthy emotional dependence on our partners.While healthy levels of oxytocin help us bond and feel warm and fuzzy towards our companions, elevated oxytocin can also fuel prejudice.

The Dope In Dopamine

The story is somewhat similar for oxytocin: too much of a good thing can be bad. Recent studies on party drugs such as MDMA and GHB shows that oxytocin may be the hormone behind the feel-good, sociable effects these chemicals produce.These positive feelings are taken to an extreme in this case, causing the user to dissociate from his or her environment and act wildly and recklessly. Furthermore, oxytocin’s role as a “bonding” hormone appears to help reinforce the positive feelings we already feel towards the people we love.

Feel Good Drug

That is, as we become more attached to our families, friends, and significant others, oxytocin is working in the background, reminding us why we like these people and increasing our affection for them. While this may be a good things for monogamy, such associations are not always positive. For example, oxytocin has also been suggested to play a role in ethnocentrism, increasing our love for people in our already-established cultural groups and making those unlike us seem more foreign.

The Double Edged Sword

And finally, what would love be without embarrassment? Sexual arousal (but not necessarily attachment) appears to turn off regions in our brain that regulate critical thinking, self-awareness, and rational behavior, including parts of the prefrontal cortex.in short, love makes us dumb. Have you ever done something when you were in love that you later regretted?

Losing Your Self?

As we’ve realized by now, it’s not just the hormone side of the equation that’s complicated. Love can be both the best and worst thing for you – it can be the thing that gets us up in the morning, or what makes us never want to wake up again. I’m not sure I could define “love” for you if I kept you here for another ten thousand pages.In the end, everyone is capable of defining love for themselves. And, for better or for worse, if it’s all hormones, maybe each of us can have “chemistry” with just about anyone. But whether or not it goes further is still up to ourselves.

Formula For Love?

Love, Actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship - Science in the News

One is better than the other in most situations.Thought they were the same? You're not alone (an empathetic reaction) and sorry if this is jarring information for you (a sympathetic reaction). But the two emotions are totally different.They feel different, when a person has empathy, they resonate with how the other person feels as a fellow and equal human being. Sympathy is pity. When someone pities someone else, they are looking down on that person.

The Difference Between Empathy And Sympathy

Empathy and sympathy each have their own set of circumstances where one might be the best emotional reaction over the other. Sometimes, you might want to try to relate to someone on their level—and if you've ever been in their position, that may even come naturally. Other times, you might not be able to relate to what they're going through, especially in situations where it might not be appropriate or possible, like losing a parent, for example.

Situational Usage

The biggest difference between empathy and sympathy is how much you are trying to connect with someone on a personal level in your interaction. Empathy is when you really listen for a feeling and try to relate to the feeling for a moment and you convey an understanding of that person’s feelings, whereas sympathy is focused on feeling sorry for someone and potentially even pitying them. You’re not working to understand how they feel; you’re putting yourself at a distance.

Empathy vs. Sympathy, Explained

One example she gives to illustrate this difference: If a sympathetic person sees a houseless person, they might give that person change and go on about their day. An empathetic person, however, would spend time with a houseless person, maybe taking them for a meal, and attempt to connect with them on a human level.

What It *Actually* Means To Be An Empath

When you're expressing empathy...<ul><li>You try to connect with the person.</li><li>You offer validating statements that let the person know it's okay to have these emotions.</li><li>You might respond with phrases like, "I get it. You have every right to feel that way."</li></ul>When you're expressing sympathy...<ul><li>You can't necessarily relate to the person's situation.</li><li>Your statements put a little bit of distance between you and that person.</li><li>You might respond with phrases like, "I feel sorry for you" or "You poor thing."</li></ul>

To break down the concept of empathy vs. sympathy further:

The short answer? Almost always. By trying to relate your friend's feelings, you're not only validating them and their reaction; you're also letting them know that the emotional reaction they're having is okay—it's human. The key here is that the other person should then act on their feelings in an emotionally intelligent or constructive way. Empathy does not give them a free pass to respond however they may want.

When should you say you have empathy for someone?

Empathy, helps a person feel less alone in their plight and feel connected and close to someone. This can help them feel that they’re more apt or able to solve their own problems.You may not have gone through this person's exact situation, but you can tap into other moments in your life where you've experienced that emotion. Think more about relating to the feeling than trying to understand the situation itself. Feelings are universal...I know exactly how it feels to feel left out. I know exactly how it feels to feel put down. Trying to understand the feeling—that’s what you’re going for.

What Is Emotional Sobriety?

When you think you might be leaning toward sympathy or pity with a loved one, remember to relate to them through the feeling they're expressing. When was the last time you felt such a way, and what do you wish someone might've told you during that time? That can help guide you toward an empathetic response in appropriate situations.

When should you say you have sympathy for someone?

Compassion is the basis of both sympathy and empathy. Leonard likes to think of compassion as "trying to understand and feeling for another person," which means it's a useful tool in both sympathetic and empathetic reactions. Sometimes, tapping into your compassionate side can help you bridge the gap between yourself and someone else. And any time you're trying your best to understand another person, says Leonard, you're doing something right.

How does compassion play into all this?

“Compassion is the wish to see others free from suffering.”-Dalai Lama

Compassion Quote

The Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy and sympathy are often mixed up, but they're totally different emotions. A psychotherapist explains the key differences between the two reactions:

Mind Your Own Business: Why You Can’t Change Other People - The Art of Living Consciously

Attachment Theory: Overview and Implications - The Human Condition

There is consolation in a philosophical approach to grief | Psyche Ideas

Love, Actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship - Science in the News

FYI: Empathy And Sympathy Are Totally Different

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